Carla Bley and Paul Haines - Escalator Over the Hill (1971)

Steve:

I first became aware of Escalator Over the Hill via the Rolling Stone Record Guide. This semi-complete guide to record albums released as of the early 1980s was my primary source of new music to seek out during those formative early teen years. I had to learn to make allowances for the publication's questionable tendency to trash bands that were obviously awesome (The Doors, The Moody Blues) but scorned them as too pretentious. I quickly learned that I liked pretentious bands! When I read that something was "self-indulgent", I went right to the store looking for it.  

I noticed an entry for Escalator Over the Hill (the only Carla Bley album reviewed in the book, probably because she's primarily known as a jazz artist) that earned the top rating of five stars and was described in a way that sounded like the most self-indulgent, pretentious album in history. You can be sure I was intrigued. A triple LP avant-jazz-rock-whatever conceptual extravaganza? I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.

When I finally did (it wasn't easy), it was everything I had hoped for and more. Dozens of different musicians were used in half a dozen different combinations covering a plethora of musical styles - big band jazz, psychedelic rock, avant garde drones, show tunes, drunken cabaret jazz, and a bewitching musical mode that sounds like what hallucinating in the desert must feel like. All of this provides the backdrop for a thoroughly surreal libretto and plot that doesn't follow a story line as much as it creates disturbing images in the listener's head. These images get progressively more disturbing as the album unfolds, until the album virtually implodes into itself by the end. 

Wow. Highly recommended to the adventurous.

[For my more in-depth review of this album on Progarchives.com, visit  CARLA BLEY Escalator Over the Hill (with Paul Haines) music review by HolyMoly (progarchives.com) ]

Dan: 

I strongly encourage anyone curious about this album to read Steve's full Progarchives review. It's knowledgeable, thorough, and helpful - at least it was to me. I've known about Carla Bley since the 1960s when I obtained Gary Burton's A Genuine Tong Funeral LP (RCA, 1968). Bley composed and arranged the "Dark Opera Without Words," as the subtitle indicated. In many ways Escalator follows logically after Genuine Tong Funeral. The jazz charts on both are novel and off the wall, even for this period of radical experimentation. Obviously, Escalator adds the words missing from Funeral, and that's where many critics shy away from it while others (like Steve) are drawn in. I'm somewhere in the middle: admiring the bravado on display and digging the jazz arrangements while remaining confused about the libretto. I'm not fond of disturbing dreams, especially my own, but artistic license being what it is, I admire artists and fans who understand the point of it better than me.

Carla Bley entered Down Beat's hall of fame in 2021. She is at her best composing and arranging thematic material such as Escalator, her own band's live performances, and all of Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra recordings (especially Ballad of the Fallen). I've written reviews of three of her 1980s albums in my jazz blog: MORE FAVORITES: Reflections on Jazz in the 1980s (jazzinthe80s.blogspot.com). Most recently, she has focused on the trio format featuring her piano, bassist Steve Swallow, and saxophonist Andy Sheppard. Both the large and small group formats are ideal settings for her sublime artistry.